Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/633

Rh the frauds which make a majority poor and ignorant, by making a minority rich and wise, and these evils also cease. Sumptuary laws cannot prevent luxury, if its cause remains; nor can the poverty and ignorance of the mass of a nation be removed by any system of education, if laws exist for enriching a minority. The laws enabling individuals to amass great wealth by means of the spoils of conquest, enslaved Rome. Laws for enriching parties of interest, by tythes, offices, sinecures and stock, enslave Europe. A division of wealth, by industry and talents, never enslaved any nation. Some idea of this intelligence from experience, seems by their constant hatred of heavy taxation, to have been planted in the minds of the people, of which ignorance is often cheated by the arts of fraud. Sometimes by charges of sordid parsimony, advanced by avaricious parties of interest ; sometimes by means too indirect and intricate to be unravelled by instinct; and at last by pretences of associating it in a plot for plundering and enslaving posterity.

Inferior agents in all wicked plots suffer punishment in this world, whilst their leaders often avoid it until the next. It seems as if these leaders hoped to expiate their own crimes by chastising their instruments, without suspecting that they may be reserved for severer justice. Thus parties of interest universally treat the mass of nations, for assisting them in their conspiracy against posterity. They reap the whole benefit of the fraud, and use it to corrupt and change the existing government. If, however, the fraud of transmitting debt, taxes and tyranny, to posterity, was assented to by every individual of an existing age, to gratify its follies or enrich its parties of interest, the assenting age itself would still be a party of interest or an aristocracy, in relation to its successors. It endeavours to enrich itself or pay its debts at the expense of a vast majority, for which it legislates without any authority. It violates its own principles of representation and taxation far more tyrannically, than was attempted by England against these states. The taxes imposed arc infinitely heavier. Not a